Interesting that you put an apostrophe (a napostrophe?) at the beginning of 'nother, wow. I've seen it that way as a contraction for "another"...but is that appropriate here? And have you seen the apostrophe in this context before?.....y'all?

I think what ‘s going on here is actually a bit more complicated, though based on tsuwm’s infix observations.

The main sense of this phrase is surely designed to bring out the ‘otherness’ as its basic feature – remarking on how different something is. So buried in the sub-conscious linguistic pattern is our frame of “an ‘other’ experience”, by analogy to “an ‘exciting’ experience” etc.

Yet when we want to express it more forcefully by inserting ‘whole’, we also recognise that we are forced to make ‘an’ agree with it by dropping the ‘n’.

This leaves a taste of incompleteness in the mouth – and when the tip of your tongue finds itself towards the top frontal position dictated by the el sound of ‘whole’, it comes back into mind, requiring you to just inflect the sides of your tongue upwards to form a palatal seal for the change to ‘nother’.

Certainly if you want to write what you speak. Writing serves a whole range of purposes. I think those who equate writing with formal and speaking with informal are guilty of inability to see that different circumstances demand different responses. Certainly speech making and debating are formal and while the former may be written at some stage in its development, it is not necessary. Notes to oneself and brief memos, although written, are informal. I would contend that posting in AWAD is mostly informal although one may be formal if one so desires.

Yes, the difference of style expected in different channels of communication is one of the things I am really interested in just now. One of the (many) intriguing things about this forum is the way these style boundaries are crossed and joined. Forming sometimes in the nature of very colloquial speech and with many of the discursive and collaborative features of dialogue, and made sometimes in more formal ‘written’ style with reference to other written texts, this seems to me a whole nother way of designing a discourse. I am looking forward to David Crystal’s book due out this autumn, in the hope that he may have some interesting research in this area.

I first heard about D.C. rat cheer in this venerable forum - many of you Brit types have praised him. Well, lo and behold, while helping my mom go through her books, what did I find but his "Encyclopedia of the English Language." Wow! I open the book to any page and am instantly riveted. I feel like a bull in a candy shop!

A few weeks ago I got an assignment back which queried my failure to use the term isogloss, and I was able to quote the page number of this to validate the more precise term I had chosen. Can't let ancient perfessers think they know it all!

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